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The Company
Time: Monday, December 27, 2010 (noon).
Place: Vancouver.
Last Event: Leaving town aboard an old bus.
Upon learning that Chaturvedi's "chauffeur," Alfred, is hiding out in Alberta with ample supplies and armaments, the Agents decide that it would be prudent to join him – if only to question him regarding his boss' likely whereabouts. Vinnie punches Alfred's map coordinates into the GPS. The location proves to be somewhere northeast of Calgary, in the Irricana area, which Ben notes is open country and quite bleak this time of year. After a quick stop for fuel on the way out of town, the old bus rattles eastward.
Road conditions are fairly good across southern B.C. After about four hours, Hamid spells Vinnie for a while. As the Agents approach the B.C.-Alberta border, Vinnie takes the wheel back – given the rattletrap vehicle, mountain roads, darkness, and winter weather, everybody wants the best driver on the job! Fortunately, the crossing is uneventful. With that done, Vinnie lets Hamid have the driver's seat for the run into the Calgary area.
It's about 04:00 on December 28 when the Agents reach Alfred's coordinates, where they find an old farm. All of the buildings are set far back from the road, behind a long fence, and there are no lights on. Nobody likes the look of the situation, but sneaking in doesn't seem wise – Alfred is the sort to shoot first. Somewhat reluctantly, Vinnie signals in the general direction of the farmhouse, flashing the bus' headlights across the wintry darkness.
As the Agents wait, they decide to search the gate area for booby traps – both because Alfred has a penchant for explosives and because if somebody else got here first, it would be foolish not to check. Vinnie indeed finds some sort of IED buried in the lonely dirt road that leads through the gate. Wen hops out and skillfully disarms this, identifying the device as a flat charge designed to erupt beneath a vehicle, likely destroying anything that lacks thick underbody armor. The mine annoys Vinnie inordinately, spurring him to yell uncharitable things about Alfred into the darkness. The response is the telltale thump of a grenade launcher . . .
. . . which the ex-military Agents immediately realize has launched a parachute flare skyward. A harsh white glow bathes the area, casting moving, sharp-edged shadows. The most interesting shadow is that of Alfred, calming strolling up the path toward the bus as he reloads an ancient M79 from a bandoleer heavily laden with all manner of 40mm grenades. He appears to be wearing a goalie mask, and has a large axe sheathed on his back. In short, he looks like his old self.
Alfred greets the team but doesn't apologize for the IED. In his words, "You, I know you would find it and disarm it. Anybody else . . . well, I like it when I get warning and they don't." Then he boards the bus and shows Vinnie where to drive and where not to drive on the way up to the barn. On reaching the building, Alfred whips out a remote control, opens the door, and instructs Vinnie to pull inside.
When the lights come on in the barn, it's evident that Alfred has been busy. He has converted the place into an automotive shop, full of tools, parts, and steel sheeting. It has two bays, one now occupied by the bus, the other holding a large tractor unit – heavy enough to haul a huge trailer – half-converted to a makeshift armored vehicle. For the time being, nobody asks Alfred what use he has in mind for that monstrosity.
Eventually, everybody heads into the farmhouse to shed their winter clothing and get something to eat. Alfred isn't much of a cook, but he has a huge supply of kitchen staples in the cellar, and a fair-sized pallet of MREs as well – not to mention a couple of cases of Latvian vodka. The Agents make a point of pretending not to notice Alfred's collection of machetes, pitchforks, and chainsaws in the cellar stairway. Qoqa simply gathers what's needed to make a meal, and then Vinnie gets to work cooking up a hearty Italian feast.
As the Agents are sitting down to eat, there's a voice from the doorway: It's Chaturvedi! The handler apologies for staying off the grid, and then sits down and joins the group. Naturally, everybody wants to know what happened and where he has been.
Chaturvedi says that on August 30 – just after the Agents left Vancouver and mere hours before he was about to leave himself – he was at lunch when he received a phone call from Asuka, daughter of Yakuza oyabun Toru. She claimed to have overheard her father talking to his saiko-komon. The men discussed how to respond to the capture of the Taluar, and concluded that they could get revenge on the Company and curry favor with the U.S. authorities by ratting out the Company to "the American agents." Asuka considered her father's intentions dishonorable after Chaturvedi's people had risked their lives to save hers, and so she felt obligated to warn Chaturvedi.
As Vinnie serves dessert, Chaturvedi goes on to explain that he assumed that "the American agents" meant the CIA, an organization that definitely has feelers in organized crime. Thus, he headed back to his hotel at once to get his belongings and leave town. On arriving there, though, he saw telltale signs of a stakeout being set up – it seems that Asuka needed a few days to get up the courage to call. This left him no choice but to bug out, leaving his attaché case in his room and his laptop in the hotel vault.
This immediately raises concerns about the attaché case. Did the CIA men at the hotel actually miss it? Jili and Paul tear it apart at once, looking for listening devices, tracking beacons, etc. However, they find nothing.
After that interlude, Chaturvedi continues his story. His next move was to summon Alfred to Canada at once to provide him with personal security – and that went well enough. However, the capture of his computer was a serious blow, as it contained a lot of sensitive information that would definitely compromise him and almost certainly his team, and possibly the entire Company. While it was all heavily encrypted, the CIA's friends in the NSA would doubtless make short work of it. All of which explains why he didn't try to warn the Agents: He couldn't risk others' lives by using channels known to the opposition.
When the Agents ask Chaturvedi why he didn't at least contact the Company, he explains that he doesn't contact the Company – it contacts him. They use a system of drops, which is fairly safe if nobody is looking for them. Unfortunately, the CIA has played this sort of game for generations, and would definitely be looking. Once again, he decided that it would be prudent not to try to communicate. In this case, he might blow the entire Company wide open!
Then it's the Agents' turn. They tell Chaturvedi about the bank-account drain and Interpol reports, and about "Angela Hamermesh." Given the timing, it seems clear that it took the CIA about three weeks to decrypt the laptop and start moving on the Company. And based on what Chaturvedi said, it sounds as if Hamermesh is a CIA operator trying to use the Agents to get at the Company. By moving the team into a high-risk operation in New Mexico, she could put them in a nice, easy-to-control American destination where they would have to make extensive use of Company resources . . . likely revealing more about the Company at each turn.
This brings the discussion to the matter of dealing with the CIA. Consensus around the table is that the CIA is substantially immune to blackmail or bribery, at least on the scale that the Agents could manage. Anabel claims to know how such services work, and has serious doubts that there is much to be done once the best-funded spies in the world take an interest in you – the best bet is to become uninteresting, so that it's harder and harder for them to justify spending money to keep an eye on you. Zhang responds by saying that given the team's methods to date, the CIA almost certainly views the Company as a terrorist organization, and won't lose interest any time soon.
Everybody agrees that while the Company's founders were idealists, they must have realized that sooner or later, they would have to keep secrets from national intelligence services. The Company has to be warned: That time has come! This makes the immediate objective reestablishing contact with the Company without going through Chaturvedi's usual channels. This may take some doing, given that the Company has no central office, just a cell structure that communicates through dead drops and one-time codes.
Over coffee, the Agents list the names of people with whom the Company has done business, who would be useful starting points: Terence West, the FSB woman "V.", the German pharmaceuticals company that flew them to Canberra, the German body-armor expert "Dieter," and even Toru the traitor. Most of these roads point to Europe, Germany in particular, so the next step seems to be crossing the Atlantic and asking some questions. In Vinnie's opinion, the best way to do that would be to get to Halifax and stow away aboard a cargo vessel. Eventually, the Agents decide to get some rest, as everybody is tired and the ideas are getting crazy.
On awakening, the Agents use what's left of December 28 to plan. They agree that a small team would probably enjoy more success, and choose Anabel, Hamid, Qoqa, Vinnie, Wen, and Zhang for the job. Communication will be in vague code sent to Gmail addresses, which Jili will set up. Transportation to Halifax will be buses and trains, which are relatively slow but usefully anonymous. A visit to Alfred's armory (in a storm shelter-cum-survivalist bomb shelter under the barn) reveals that the travelers can have any weaponry they want, as long as it's heavy-duty Canadian Armed Forces gear from the 1970s and 80s. They decide that it would be unwise to smuggle FN C1s and C2s, much less a freakin' mortar, and settle on a few knives.
On Wednesday, December 29, the six Agents heading east say farewell. Chaturvedi tells them to take the money from his attaché case to cover expenses. They head into Calgary to buy a few books and cheap iPods to break the monotony, as well as some inexpensive clothing, and then set out on a long series of bus and train rides. The journey is deliberately slow and indirect, with Vinnie carefully parceling out the cash and choosing cheap, unpredictable routes over fast, straightforward ones. It seems to pay off: All goes well, and if CIA men are watching, they're remarkably good at hiding.
It's the afternoon of Saturday, January 8, 2011 when the group pulls into Halifax by bus. The first order of business is to rent rooms in a cheap Bedford motel and send a quick e-mail note westward reporting that all is well. After some rest, the Agents decide that it's time to learn what their options are for ships heading to European ports. The best people to ask about that would be sailors, and of course Halifax has many pubs that cater to that crowd.
Toward evening, Anabel, Hamid, Qoqa, and Vinnie head into the city to hit the pubs near the port, operating individually in order to best apply their unique talents to the problem. Hamid's night is unremarkable. The sexy Anabel has to beat sailors off with a stick, and even has one drunken chap propose to smuggle her across on a ship – an offer she declines. Vinnie learns more about the local underworld than the ships in port, and ends up buying a hot SIG-Sauer P226, just in case. And Qoqa winds up in an after-hours drinking contest where she walks off with $120 in cash, a 100cl bottle of Becherovka, and a cheap digital watch.
On returning to the motel, the Agents pool their findings and conclude that the best bet is a ship departing for Rotterdam the following day. Fortunately, Wen and Zhang were preparing for a trip while the others were out crawling pubs. They took some cash to the all-night superstore and stocked up on meal-replacement bars and drinks, and other things needed by people planning to stow away for eight or nine days in a cold cargo hold.